thoughts

Just a quick note to say I am alive and don’t plan on ending my active streak writing about comics and drag and everything here on CK. I needed to devote my time and my brain to some other topics this week, but I’ll be catching up with you all shortly ?

This is available to everyone, but it was made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis:

X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men 

Now that I’ve re-read all of the X-Men Classic back-up stories as part of our Epic X-Men (re)Read, I had some adjustments to make to this guide. As a result, I rebuilt my reading order database for all of the Original 5 X-Men + Xavier + Havok, Polaris, Magneto, & Mimic.

That didn’t lead to too many changes, but I adjusted the placement of several stories. Also, reader comments lead me to update or add placements for all of X-Men First Class, Ka-Zar #2-3, Avengers #102-104, and several other stories and guest appearances.

Last week I had a chance to sit down with Jace from “The Comic Source” to talk about the behind-the-scenes of the past decade of Crushing Comics!

Our discussion including my approach to outlining comic guides, how I find the time to read thousands of comics a year, and why my focus is on opening gates rather than gatekeeping. Check out our full conversation on The Comic Source podcast or at Apple Podcasts,  Spotify,  SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play.

Zach joined me on this episode because I had never read a single issue from the first half of this box of Hulk comics. Can he convince me to shelve any of them? They’re all covered in my Hulk Guide.

Welcome to the first post in a countdown of my Top 125 [American digital] comics of 2019!

I read >2500 comics released between November 2018 & November 2019 from more than 550 series and more than 30 publishers, because I wanted to be able to say that one year I made a definitive list of my favorite comics considering everything.

To arrive at this list, I sampled nearly every US digitally-available release from Marvel, DC, Image, Aftershock, Ahoy, Boom, Cave Pictures, Comixology, Dark Horse, Dynamite, Humanoids, IDW, Lion Forge, Mad Cave, Valiant, Vault, & Zenescope, plus many comics from other publishers.

(Why November to November? Even though I was still reading in December 2019, most best-of-year lists cut off in October or November, and I wanted to be roughly analogous. Why a Top 125? Because it felt like a cut-off where I could favorably recommend almost any title on the list.)

Even though this is a subjective list of favorites, there’s still some objectivity baked into it.

I rated every issue I read, totaled the ratings within the release window, applied two algorithms to rank their scores, and then took some liberties with ordering based on pure love.

(My 1st algorithm combats recency effects and gives more credit to longer-running series since it’s harder to maintain quality on a longer run. My 2nd algorithm is my “recommendation index,” a modified Net Promoter Score that weighs a series’ awesome issues against its dull ones)

Okay, that’s enough of a preamble – onto my Top 125 Comics of 2019!

Ready? (Or, if you prefer a Twitter countdown, start here!) [Read more…] about Krisis’s Favorite Comic Series of 2019 – #125 – 101